Mark Twain and Youth by Mac Donnell Kevin B. Rasmussen R. Kent & R. Kent Rasmussen

Author:Mac Donnell, Kevin B.,Rasmussen, R. Kent & R. Kent Rasmussen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474223119
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

16

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Peter Messent

In Mark Twain’s own words, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is “simply a hymn put into prose form to give it a worldly air” (MTL2 476). Youth itself, in the depictions of Tom, and the antebellum American world through which he moves are equally celebrated in the novel. The representation of the boy, the time, and the place combine to make the book an iconic text—one that has had the most extraordinary effect on the national cultural consciousness. There is little need to look far for evidence of the way the book has passed into common memory. One sign of this lies in a shared knowledge of scenes like the whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence. Another is in the continuing recycling of Twain’s characters and settings in a present-day context, nowhere more obviously than in Tom Sawyer’s Island at Disneyland. As Stephen Railton puts it on his University of Virginia website, Mark Twain in His Times,

In Tom Sawyer generations of readers have found access not just to childhood as a realm of summertime adventures, but to a mythic “once upon a time” in the national past, a place before the disruptions of industrialization, urbanization and immigration that were already beginning to transform the face of America even when M[ark] T[wain]’s novel first appeared.

Such a nostalgic view of the novel, as will later be shown, tends to obscure some of the book’s more disturbing and ambiguous aspects. But it is clear just how important the subject of youth is to the book: Samuel Clemens’s own youth and that of his protagonist, as well as that of the still-young and developing nation, to which both are symbiotically tied. Twain clearly based the novel on his own boyhood experience in Hannibal, Missouri (the St. Petersburg of the text) where he lived from 1839 to 1853. In the novel’s preface, he speaks of Tom as being “a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew,” but also says that “one or two . . . of the adventures recorded . . . were experiences of my own.” Tom Sawyer is not a million miles away from the boy Twain himself once was. Twain’s version of his past self can never be entirely trusted but he does generally seem—to paraphrase Huck Finn—to have “mainly . . . told the truth”—though with a few stretchers. So, in Life on the Mississippi (1883), he recalls a “whisky-sodden tramp” burnt to death in the local jail in a fire started by matches he himself had provided: “I saw that face . . . every night for a long time afterward; and I believed myself . . . guilty of the man’s death” (LM 549). This incident is not exactly replicated in Tom Sawyer, but Tom does smuggle “small comforts” to the town drunk, Muff Potter, when he is jailed for the murder of Dr. Robinson (ch. 11). And, in the manuscript of the novel, the words “burnt up the old

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